Say you do not like cats and, within about four seconds, someone online will tell you what is wrong with you as a person. Not what is wrong with your reasoning. What is wrong with you.
That reflex got a very public workout in early March 2026. On March 2, Doechii posted on Threads that “people act like it’s a crime to dislike cats when they genuinely aren’t friendly animals,” adding that it is rare for cats to be affectionate “without years of pain and work put in.” The replies came in hot. Around the same time, an interview clip resurfaced in which Hamnet co-stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley were asked to pick cats or dogs. Buckley did not hesitate, said cats are mean, and told the story of the ultimatum she once gave her now-husband about his two cats: “It’s me or the cats.” (She won. She later went on The Tonight Show on March 5 to say the whole thing was a misconception and that she loves cats, which is its own kind of answer.)
And in the wake of all this, one particular explanation started circulating with real confidence: if you hate cats, you are a narcissist.
It is a tidy theory. It is also not true, and the reason it caught on is more interesting than the theory itself.
There is no evidence linking cat dislike to narcissism
Let’s be direct, because the internet was not. Disliking cats is not a symptom of narcissistic personality disorder. There is no study, no clinical criterion, and no diagnostic instrument in which pet preference appears. None.
Narcissistic personality disorder is a specific and fairly grim clinical picture. The diagnostic criteria describe someone who is grandiose, who requires constant admiration, and who cannot readily empathize. The severe end of the spectrum can run to exploitation, deceit, and genuine contempt for other people’s rights. Being unmoved by cats is not on that list, and neither is preferring dogs.
The version of the theory that circulated on TikTok went further and argued that narcissists dislike cats because cats are themselves narcissists. That claim collapses on contact. A cat that accepts affection only when it is in the mood is not exhibiting a disorder, it is exhibiting boundaries. By that standard every person who has ever said “not right now” would qualify.
The cat-versus-dog gulf is mostly a story we tell
Here is where the pop-psychology take gets the animals wrong, which is the part that actually annoys me.
The theory assumes dogs are uniformly devoted and cats are uniformly aloof, and then reads a person’s character off which one they choose. But dogs are not one thing. Some are velcro dogs, some are standoffish, some tolerate handling and not much more. Neither are cats. Some cats greet the door. Some sit on the shoulder of the one person in the house who is allergic and ignoring them.
What both species actually respond to is the same: consistency, having their needs met, and a person who reads their signals instead of overriding them. That is not a cat trait or a dog trait. It is an animal trait.
“Cats are not aloof, they are specific,” says Dr. Nina Kohl. “A cat that walks away from a stranger reaching over its head is not being cold, it is declining an approach that any cat would find rude. People who say cats do not like them are very often describing an interaction the cat found threatening. Change the approach, sit still, let the cat come, and the same ‘unfriendly’ cat behaves like a different animal.”
Which points at the boring, unglamorous explanation the pop-psych take skips right past: most people who say they do not like cats have had very few good interactions with them, and a fair number of bad ones, and the bad ones were usually caused by a human getting the greeting wrong. Scratched hands are frequently not evidence of a cat’s character. They are evidence of a body-language conversation that one party did not know was happening.
So why do we reach for a diagnosis?
Because it is comfortable.
Categorizing people is a shortcut. It collapses something ambiguous, “this person likes a different animal than I do,” into something firm, “this person is defective.” Once someone is defective, you no longer have to think about them.
And there is a specific pleasure in a theory that confirms what you already suspected. If a stranger’s cat comment gave you a flicker of ick, a video telling you that flicker was clinically justified turns a bias into an insight. It feels like understanding. It is closer to permission.
Real psychology does not work like that. Preferences get shaped by childhood, by a bad scratch at age six, by allergies, by culture, by a household that never had a cat, and sometimes by nothing at all. Compressing a whole person into one data point is efficient and it is usually wrong.
The better question
There is a legitimate version of the curiosity underneath all this. Not “what is wrong with cat-haters,” but: what would change their mind?
Mostly, one good cat. Not a demonstration, not an argument, and definitely not a stranger insisting that their cat is different. A low-pressure room, a cat who is allowed to make the first move, and a person who has been told, once, that the polite way to greet a cat is to hold still and let it decide.
Doechii is not a narcissist. Jessie Buckley is not a monster, and by her own account has been miserable about being cast as one. They are, at most, people who have not had the good cat yet.
The more useful thing to examine is the speed with which the rest of us reached for a personality disorder to explain a preference, and what that says about how we handle disagreement when it costs us nothing to be cruel.
References
- American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision. Narcissistic Personality Disorder diagnostic criteria. https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm
- CNN. “Is it cool to hate cats now? Jessie Buckley and Doechii seem to think so.” 5 March 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/05/entertainment/hate-cats-jessie-buckley-doechii
- Vitale, K. R., Behnke, A. C., and Udell, M. A. R. “Attachment bonds between domestic cats and humans.” Current Biology, vol. 29, no. 18, 2019. https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(19)31086-3
- Vitale Shreve, K. R., Mehrkam, L. R., and Udell, M. A. R. “Social interaction, food, scent or toys? A formal assessment of domestic pet and shelter cat (Felis silvestris catus) preferences.” Behavioural Processes, vol. 141, 2017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28288834/
